electron-jsx-hotload

1.0.0 • Public • Published

electron-jsx-hotload

One of the nice things about electron is that the code executed inside the chromium context is still a full-fledged node-style context and has access to all the nifty things that node and node-modules have to offer.

This enourmous advantage is lost when using most any bundling system such as browserify or webpack since these bundle all sources into a single file and replace require with something else. This means that loading actual node_modules from the actual node_modules directory (or native) stops working.

At the same time these bundlers also fulfill two other purposes:

  • transforming JSX/ES2015 code to actual javascript
  • allowing for component hot-reloading

In electron we don't actually want the bundling and messing with require. What we'd really want is for the transformation of JSX to be transparent and hot-reloading to just work without messing up other stuff.

Enter electron-jsx-hotload. It creates a new file loader for the standard node module system. It then transforms these files from JSX to vanilla javascript. It also analyses the exports of any loaded JSX-module for React.Components and enables them to be hot-loaded.

If chokidar (peer-dependency) is available and process.env.NODE_ENV is not "production" it also watches the root folder for any changes to JSX files and hot-swaps them into the window.

How to do this? Just add:

<script type="text/javascript">require('electron-jsx-hotload')('.jsx')</script> 

To the <head> tag of any electron HTML file. This will allow you to just use:

require('./my-file.jsx')

to load your JSX-React components. These will also hot-reload if a file-change is noticed. And best of all, inside your JSX files you can now require any node-module native or otherwise without depending on shims and worrying that some bun(d|g)ler has messed with require.

** No more web-server to run; no more bundling to be done; full-access to node-modules **

License

Copyright 2017 Philipp Dunkel

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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npm i electron-jsx-hotload

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Version

1.0.0

License

MIT

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